Tagged: journey

I’d been thinking about what to do for my project for many weeks now, but it was only recently that I was able to come up with a more concrete idea based on the things I’ve explored related to love. The professor had explained to me that I needed to be more specific about my final statement about love, because the idea I’d pitched was too broad and vague. And when I was asked to articulate about my idea/statement, I realized that I still had difficulty explaining it, because my statement lacked details. And so, everyday for many weeks, I would think of my statement and tried to narrow it down to a more specific topic.

Since our professor wanted us to stick to our original idea, I tried to explore more about the concept of a journey—its nature, and the things usually related/involved with it. Again, I tried to organize my ideas using a mindmap (a tool which I never realized could be so useful), which I drew by hand on a sketchpad. I’ve attached a photo of the mindmap so you can see what I came up with so far (click on the image to see the original size). A few weeks after I drew this mindmap, I realized that I wanted to focus on thenature of a journey, because I think love is just like a journey that we undertake throughout our lifetime.

Considering that each person’s understanding and meaning of love is unique, and that love is very much unpredictable, I began thinking of how a journey could be represented/applicable in real-life situations. And then I remembered the Monopoly board game (which I was fond of playing when I was younger), whose gameplay is indeed unpredictable because of the rolling of dice. The dice signify the concept of “chance” or “fate,” which then contributes to a varying or uncertain journey around the game board.

The title of “Collect 200” was then developed as a diminutive of the name of the starting box in Monopoly–which is “Collect $200 Salary As You Pass Go.” I’d chosen this part of the game board as a title because it represents the starting and ending point of a journey, in addition to being a place that provides free money. For anyone who has experience playing the game, “Collect 200” is a phrase often said by players throughout a game session, because players are eager to collect money. In a sense, reaching or passing through “Collect 200” is each player’s goal—something that keeps them going. But getting to that box is not easy, especially when all the properties on the board have been bought by players, and you are required to pay rent when you land on a property you don’t own. Suddenly, the free money is no longer just that, it becomes a form of “reward” for completing the circuit and surviving the game.

Indeed, there are many aspects of the board game that can describe love even further, but I’ve only summarized the most important ones in the short draft of the narrative I’ve written during the weekend. Hopefully I can develop more ideas as I go along, but for now I just wanted to introduce what I’ve worked out so far.